‘Below the Clouds’ Review: Gianfranco Rosi’s Haunting Portrait of Naples’ Hidden Life (MUBI)

The history of cinema is rich with so-called “city symphonies,” films that map urban life through rhythms, routines, and the interplay of spaces and people. The most canonical example remains Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 landmark. Gianfranco Rosi’s Under the Clouds operates within that lineage, but from an inverted premise. Rather than foregrounding a city’s defining images, it burrows into its margins—its hidden zones, its overlooked infrastructures, its silences.

The city in question is Naples, and Rosi renders it in a way that pointedly avoids the folkloric. This is not the bustling, chaotic, sunlit Naples of postcards and clichés, but a nocturnal, almost spectral version: one shaped by night shifts, emergency call centers, and archaeological digs. Hovering over everything is the latent threat of Mount Vesuvius, the still-active volcano that annihilated Pompeii in 79 AD and could, at any moment, do so again—burying the region under ash, gas, and molten rock.

Below the Clouds moves through these worlds without hierarchy. Rosi’s camera—static, patient, often working in stark, near-monochrome compositions—drifts through peripheral and liminal spaces. Aside from a single burst of popular religious ritual, the vibrant, “Maradonian” Naples is largely absent. Instead, the city’s famed verbosity emerges through disembodied voices: the phone calls received at a fire department switchboard, which becomes one of the film’s central nodes. Many callers seem less interested in emergencies than in human contact. Through these exchanges, a cross-section of urban anxieties takes shape: domestic disputes, neighborly conflicts, tremors that trigger fear, complaints about crime—and even one man who calls repeatedly just to ask for the time.

Rosi (Sacro GRA, Fire at Sea) also turns his attention to teams working on the preservation and recovery of artifacts from the ancient world—a familiar sight in Italian cities, yet rarely foregrounded. Their quiet battle against vandalism and theft, their painstaking efforts to unearth and safeguard fragments of the past, unfold in this subdued Naples that seems to be searching for itself, largely unnoticed and underappreciated.

Elsewhere, the film observes an elderly tutor preparing students of all ages for exams; children studying languages, cooking, or grappling with canonical literature. Ukrainian and Syrian workers arrive by ship with grain cargo, speaking candidly about their lives and hardships. All of this unfolds across a region—spanning neighborhoods in and around Naples—perpetually under the gaze of Vesuvius and its clouds, a presence that is at once majestic and ominous, as if silently bearing witness and judgment.

As suggested by its final, lyrical shot, this is a landscape where past and present collapse into one another, always subject to the forces of nature and the slow violence of time. Below the Clouds ultimately plays like a muted, minor-key symphony—somber, shadowy, even funereal in tone, with Daniel Blumberg’s score deepening its sepulchral atmosphere. In a ruined movie theater, images from Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy flicker on screen, echoing the film’s thematic concerns. Meanwhile, the city—perhaps the country, perhaps the world—continues on, oblivious. And it will likely remain so, until it’s too late.